The Good, the Pod, and the Ugly

Upper Manhattan is still registering the aftershocks of last night's ruckus on Israel at the 92nd Street Y, a steel-cage tag-team clash of ideas that went lopsided when one of the panelists, Commentary editor and film critic impersonator John Podhoretz, lost his flemenco temper and flounced off the stage. By all accounts, including his own, he invited the 92Y audience, which was uncustomarily thronged with boobirds, to hiss. "[A]fter a prolonged bout of booing, I responded by suggesting—in a manner that was intended, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons, to be ironic—that the crowd might try hissing too."

Veteran gunslingers will recognize this as a Norman Mailer move. In the very entertaining biography of Mailer by J. Michael Lennon, he recounts that Mailer, faced with a contentious college audience in Berkeley (following the publication of The Prisoner of Sex, among other provocations), asked the feminists in the audience to hiss and, after they obliged, said, "Obedient little bitches."

Yes, things were much more raw-boned in the 70's, when intellectual antagonists and provocateurs weren't afraid to hold their obnoxious ground. Imagine what a truncated documentary Town Bloody Hall would have been had Mailer, after being hooted by much the audience and torpedo'd by Cynthia Ozick's question from the floor, had growled, "That's it, I'm outta here." [Exit bear, pursued by Germaine Greer.]

But John Podhoretz is no more Norman Mailer than his father was. He is made of more gelatinous stuff. He had had a long day; he was tired, cranky, under par pugilistically; so when the moderator Jane Eisner of the Forward got a little too air-handsy with him, he had had enough and went all "Don't stomp your little last season Prada shoes at me, honey" (Legally Blonde), leaving in a cloud of huff.

Back in 2007, his father and neoconservative eminence Norman Podhoretz (Pod senior) had a rough go of it at a Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side by a group protesting his call to bomb Iran--a favorite tune of his--and now Pod junior is given the bum's rush on the Upper East Side. It's getting to where a guy has no place safe to go!